December 2005 Archives

Ken Moyle will be out of the office from December 22nd through January 1st. Contact sysadmin@math.mcmaster.ca with any questions or requests.

The university is closed over the Christmas break (December 24th through Janurary 1st) and there will be no support for the research systems during that period.

Merry Christmas, Happy Hannukah, an Agreeable Anythingelse and a Happy New Year to all.

The latest releases of versions 8 and 9 of the Intel Fortran compilers and versions 7 and 8 of the Math Kernel Libraries have been installed on freesurface, bayes and the msprime workstations.

Firefox and Thunderbird on the Hamilton Hall msprime and T13-109 workstations have been updated.

The five minutes of lost network access to mathserv scheduled for 8:00 am today ended up requiring a server reboot and about eight minutes of total downtime. Mathserv was back up at 8:30 and is now operating with a faster network connection.

The departmental servers and workstations were back up at 6:45 pm. The department web site was down between 7:00 pm and 8:45 pm due to a DNS delay.

All the servers are now in the new rack and power can now be divided between the current and soon-to-arrive UPS without general service interruptions. The msprime workstations will have picked up where they left off before the server went down at 10:00 am.

My thanks to everyone for their patience during this extended - but necessary - downtime today.

As announced in November, mathserv and the other servers in the Hamilton Hall server room will be unavailable much of tomorrow.

The computers will be powered off shortly after 10:00 am; they should be back up for good in the early afternoon.

The msprime workstations in Hamilton Hall don't need to be shut down; when mathserv comes back up, they should pick up exactly where they left off.

For more information, please see the original announcement.

In addition to the servers originally listed, these will also be down tomorrow: modelmath, space.

An unannounced consequence of the (announced) mould-removal work on the first floor of Hamilton Hall is that the building fans have been shut down, which means that there is no air conditioning in the server room. The temperature in the server room was high enough to cause equipment failure by late morning; in fact, one compute server had already crashed.

In order to reduce heat output, I have shut down all non-production systems (freesurface, bluespruce, mathserv2). Spruce and redpine were idle and have been shutdown, as well. I may have to shutdown non-essential servers (bayes, space, modelmath) at very short notice in order to keep the temperature low enough for mathserv to stay up.

I've been told that the air conditioning will be restarted when work on the mould removal stops at ca. 2:30 today.

Four people report difficulties connect to off campus web sites from computers in Hamilton Hall on Thursday. I have contacted UTS; please let me know if you have experienced similar problems.

4:20 pm: the problems have been resolved.